The Revolution Happened, but It Happened on the Right
When the Watergate story broke in the summer of 1972, as Carl Woodward and Bob Bernstein followed the money all the way up to President Richard M. Nixon, they discovered a long trail of tricky Dickery along the way. Nixon’s top operatives, known as the USC Mafia, had been tasked with the mission of messing with the Democrats. They called it “ratfucking.” Chief among the hit men was Donald Segretti, who was engaged in various activities designed to sabotage the Democratic primary — and manipulate the uncontested Republican convention, as well. Dirty tricks against the opposition is nothing new in politics. It happens all the time. According to Woodward and Bernstein, however, Nixon’s brand of mischief was unprecedented. The smears involved deep deep undercover work that would eventually include the Watergate break-in. But it was the crime of obstruction of justice that ultimately did in Nixon.
While investigating Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein discovered, among other things, that Nixon’s men had routinely gathered information to destroy their competition, but probably the most relevant ploy for today would be the toppling of Edmund Muskie. Nixon thought Muskie to be the candidate who posed the greatest threat. Charles Colson admitted to forging the “Canuck Letter,” slurring New Hampshire voters of French-Canadian ancestry, which became one of the public embarrassments that would provoke Muskie to break down emotionally during a campaign speech in Manchester. With Muskie down for the count, that left George McGovern, a man the Nixon campaign thought would be incredibly easy to defeat in a possible landslide. In the end, after Nixon’s ratfucking all but destroyed McGovern, Nixon would take every state except Massachusetts.
Just create a jumble of multiple messes and make it impossible for the Democrats to unite, was Nixon’s directive.
Fast forward to the election of 2016. The year began with Karl Rove and the GOP attempting to ratfuck the Democrats by pushing Bernie Sanders. He would be the easier candidate to beat, thus the one they wanted to run against. On the left, the Clinton campaign felt Trump would be the easiest one to beat so they wanted to run against him. One of the key strategies for Rove and others was to bait the left to turn against itself, just as Nixon had done in ’72. Make it all but impossible for the Democrats to unite. They hoped the end result would be to nominate Jeb Bush, who had already raised $150 million before the election had even started. Their next best alternative would have been John Kasich. Both of these party-line Republicans can be controlled within the confines of the Republican establishment. The wrench in the works was that the far right had already launched the Tea Party revolution, not this year but in 2008, on the heels of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency.
In many ways, the Bernie Sanders revolutionaries are a lot like the Tea Party in 2008. In fact, if you think of the Occupy Wall Street movement giving birth to the modern day “Bernie Bro,” it’s easy to see how outrage over the Wall Street bailout led to parallel revolutionary movements on the left and the right. The Tea Party sprang from that bailout, though its underlying hatred was fueled by the subsequent Obama presidency. Both movements were and are angry about the $700 billion given to the banks to hold the bloated financial system together.
Both sides were angry at the Obama administration’s support for terms of the bailout. As Republicans dug in their heels, Congress ground to a halt, but Democrats at least held control of the White House. Furious Tea Party voters were so motivated they were able elected even more members of Congress. Over the last eight years, they have only gained in strength, especially in building the “Freedom Caucus” whose obstruction attitude toward establishment Republicans forced John Boehner from power. They have now put Paul Ryan in change, to lead the right in their quest to unravel core Democratic policies going all the way back to FDR.
In 2012, Trump hovered on the fringes. He was written off by most observers for being nothing but a crazy birther, with little or no conviction for anything in particular, except to boost his own fame by fanning the flames of racist hate against the sitting president, the first black President of the United States. The Republicans had a long-term game plan to roll back essential social programs. All they needed was a President willing to play along. Marco Rubio would have been fine. Chris Christie would have been fine. Ted Cruz was a bit too radical fundamentalist for their tastes. Had Rubio and Cruz dropped out much earlier, the race might have been down to Trump vs. Kasich. The Republican base would have supported Kasich against Trump, but with Cruz and Rubio splitting up that last potential bastion they could not harness enough power to stop Trump.
Trump was doing two things. He was tapping into all the bitter resentment of White America and their imagined diminishment at the hands of the first Black President, and he was shattering the rules of political correctness that had begun to piss off many Americans who felt they were being told what they could and couldn’t say, what was offensive, what was unacceptable. The most virulent resentment seemed to center around white Americans but men in particular. They’ve been in charge since America began and have not taken well to the idea that someone was suddenly telling them what they could and could not say. Nationwide support for gay marriage and transgender rights have also shredded the fabric of their control.
While Trump has always been seen as a person who tells it like he thinks it is, warts and all, we didn’t see him do much damage in 2012. But once Bernie Sanders came on the scene and spoke out on the left against the “establishment,” Trump seized the opportunity to do the same on the right.
Trump has ignited a warped idea of “freedom” that many Americans have used since the beginning to justify everything from the rape and pillage of First Americans, to slavery, to Jim Crow laws, to abuse of fossil fuels, and more. “Freedom,” as people like Trump or Sarah Palin would have it, can best be defined like this: “as an American I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, to whomever I want and nobody can tell me not to.” There are clearly millions of Americans who believe this way. If they elect Trump they think they can get it back.
That’s what the 2016 election means for the future of America. One one side, the rise of equal rights for women, people of color and LGBTQ individuals. On the other side, the predominantly male-driven White America that wants its country back.
The Bernie Sanders revolution is now where the Tea Party was back in 2008. They are not launching a revolution against the opposition. That was Barack Obama, a Democrat, declaring that the Bush presidency — and the Republicans backing him — was a disaster and leading the country to change course. Thus, the citizenry voted in opposition to that GOP calamity, and put their faith in a two-term Democrat. The Tea Party candidates called themselves Republicans on the ballot but in actuality they wanted to be more than an opposition movement — their goal was to drag the entire party in an extreme shift to the right. The Sanders movement is doing exactly the same thing on the other end of the spectrum, seeking to launch a revolution from within the left against the left itself. That is why it was destined to fail from the outset.
The only chance a same party candidate has to follow up a two-term president in the same party is the stay the course. The best example is Harry S. Truman, who took up the Democratic mantle at the beginning of FDR’s fourth term. That’s what George H.W. Bush did, picking up where Reagan’s two terms had left off. But throughout American political history there has been no successful attempt to push a radical shift in the same direction as the sitting president.
There seem to be three distinct types of Bernie supporters. Some are young millennials who woke up politically during Obama’s presidency and believe that his accomplishments are not good enough for them. Others align with Occupy Wall Street protesters. A few are holdovers from the 1960s counter-culture revolution. The Occupy Wall Street group doesn’t seem care if Trump becomes president. All they care about is fixing Wall Street and they won’t vote for Clinton because they’ve been told she’s beholden to “Big Money.” They convince themselves and others not to vote for her because “they’re all the same.” The generation of holdovers from the 1960s lived through Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, so they’ve seen what can happen when the GOP has free reign. They will likely vote for Clinton when she becomes the nominee, even if they’re not thrilled about it. They’ve learned what history teaches. The millennials, though, are going to need more than one lesson. And they’re going to get more than one lesson. This election is likely to turn them off because as a generation, throughout their childhoods, they’ve become accustomed to being catered to. They spend freely if they can have exactly what they want. Question is, when all their wished don’t come true, will they decide nothing is worth fighting for? It’s hard to say. Either way, despite overly confident voices about the outcome of this election, everyone on the left should fear a Trump win. His is the revolution that actually has traction.
The biggest difference between the Tea Party in 2008 and the Bernie Sanders movement in 2016 is that the Tea Party voters did not savage John McCain and Sarah Palin the same way the Sanders supporters attack Democrats — not just Hillary Clinton, but down-ballot candidates, veteran Democratic heroes, and the Democratic party itself. Throwing chairs and yelling obscenities to disrupt the process isn’t revolutionary — it’s a tantrum. Like the Tea Party, the most extreme disciples on the left have abandoned trust in reputable media sources, declaring even the New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker to be “shills” for Hillary and the establishment. This is precisely what the right has sought to do for many years now, depending instead on those outlets and news programs that pander to their fears and massage their anger. Trump is the result of that kind of propaganda-driven press.
Because the most vehement Bernie Sanders supporters have convinced themselves that everything is corrupt and can’t be trusted, they have also convinced themselves that nothing would be worse than a Clinton presidency. Not even Trump. Susan Sarandon and others like her continue to dream that Bernie Sanders might still be the nominee, and as that fantasy collapses their resentment for Clinton only deepens.
More than anything else, though, the most dangerous thing Bernie Sanders supporters are doing is taking the bait the right has laid out for them. They are being played in a grand fashion, not only by the early insidious ratfucking, but now by Donald Trump himself, who continually massages the anger of bitter Sanders supporters who echo Trump’s taunts: “It’s not fair!” “They’re cheating!” Republicans are now voting for Clinton to stop her and support Trump, as happened in West Virginia yet Sanders says nothing. His campaign even seeks to take advantage of Trump’s surefire win in California to try to block Clinton.
Every day, as Clinton’s candidacy grows stronger, the Bernie Sanders “revolutionaries” continue to see her as the dragon to slay and they’ve carelessly left Trump alone. Bernie Sanders did not go after Trump the day Trump tried to demean Elizabeth Warren. Sanders himself stays silent after each violent disruption of Clinton rallies, almost as though he likes to watch his soldiers fight for the revolution he never led way back when. He likes the fighting, he likes the hero worship, and he now feels more vital and important than he has ever felt in his life. Otherwise, he would sober up and face the reality we are all facing: do not treat the Democratic party itself like the enemy when you purport to run as a Democrat.
With the unwitting help of Bernie Sanders, the right has succeeded this year in busting up the Democratic party. Whether we can come together or not remains to be seen. Trump, though, seems to have launched a real revolution. Maybe it didn’t have a plan in the beginning but at the very least its hatred has spread to become a formidable revolt. Establishment Republicans are not happy to see their best laid plans upended by Trump. He has shown that he has no allegiance to anyone. He’ll say whatever he feels like saying. Trump is reaping the rewards Sanders wished he could have reaped.
Perhaps had Sanders launched his revolution against a sitting Republican president he would have stood a better chance. As it is, both the Sanders and the Trump movements have much in common. They ignite the frustration within their base, the white American male. Sanders and Trump have both successfully vilified and villainized Hillary Clinton so that the supporters of each feel they can say anything or do anything because it’s in the name of a greater good. Never in our lifetimes have we seen such a vile display of ugliness — not even when Obama was running — because at least then the angry white males on the left did not feel as threatened as they seem to be now with a woman running.
For Democrats, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who has the majority support of black, Latino and women voters. She represents the new face of America. No, it isn’t a radical shift to the left. She promises to stay the course to defend President Obama’s legacy, just as Harry Truman did for FDR 70 years ago. The difference between then and now is this: the future of America is not in the hands of white men any longer, as the census numbers show us. Without doubt, white Americans are a shrinking demographic. This election is proving to be a last desperate grab for white men to hold on to that power. It reflects a slow but steady shift as America’s diverse population comes to power.
Will Democrats chose to embrace that diversity? Or will the final months of Obama’s milestone presidency be a radical shift to turn away from his policies, his achievements, and the color of skin? His presidency has clearly picked a long festering scab of resentment and privilege on the right, and encourages a different kind of privilege on the left, one that says the whitest states should control the Democratic party even without the majority vote. Sanders thought nothing of dismissing black voters in the South because, he said, they live in states too conservative to matter. The most loyal bloc of voters in the Democratic party doesn’t matter. Instead of reaching toward the future to rally support, both Trump and Sanders have chosen to reach very very far into the darkest corners of our American past.
